I’m going to dispense with the usual guff that I come up with as an introduction to a review. You all know what the Terminator movies are about, I’m sure. If you don’t, then imagine a very, very muscular chap running about shooting a lots of things, making lots of noise and creating more than a few explosions. That sounds a little like a Conservative MP’s stereotypical view of a video game, does it not’
Unfortunately, we’re quite possibly going to lose a few fans (corporate or otherwise) by the time this review is finished. I thought that with a movie like Terminator 3, a video game based on it would be average at worst and quite possibly stunning at best, even though we’ve all been burnt by shoddy licences in the past. I prayed for another Lord of The Rings. Time for another “unfortunately”. Unfortunately, I was wrong – more wrong than I ever thought it possible to be. If I offered you a deleted scene from the the celluloid version of Terminator 3, and then told you that I was going to charge you forty pounds for the privelege, you’d laugh in my face. Well, guess what’ There is so little else worth looking at on the PS2 disc of Terminator 3: Rise of The Machines, that Atari seem to be doing just that.
Let’s run through a brief list of problems that I noted whilst playing the game, just to make it a little clearer, shall we’ Firstly, the game contains sprites. Sprites. Yes, sprites. We’re looking at a “next-generation” console game that uses techniques that were being used back in the days of the Amstrad CPC 464. Following on (or through) from that, we have artifical intelligence that is an insult to the term. The enemies trudge towards you in a completely non-threatening way, nearly always dying after you’ve shot them down twice. After this, we have some incredibly shoddy level design that will make you practically beg for any poor PS2 game that you have sold/thrown away/used as a drinks coaster to come back to your waiting arms and let you play it. Then, we have the fact that when you use a “continue”, the tougher enemies are removed from play, allowing you to walk back through to where you died without problems. But, above all this, we have the wonderful use of the L1 button.
If you have any FPS game, load it up. Start a game and then target an enemy. Shoot it. It can be tough to get that aiming reticle to just the right place at times, huh’ THAT’S THE IDEA! Let’s take a similar look at T3:ROTM. Load up the game, start playing and press L1 followed by “fire”. Dead. The enemy is dead. He may get back up, though, so press “fire” again to be sure. Now he’s dead. I could teach a two year-old how to make not-so-pretty lights appear in this game, but he’d probably get bored of debating the use of yet more sprites quite soon, what with most toddler’s short attention span. L1 auto-targets everything for you. Any challenge in the game is therefore removed rather quickly, meaning the disc will be in your PS2 for as long as it takes you to press L1 and fire a couple of hundred times. Or until you throw up.
There is little more to say. The words just aren’t there to express how bad this game really is. I wish they were. The thing is, the Terminator films all came across as being really sci-fi and futuristic, so I never really expected the game to be worse than the worst of the bad PSone FPS games that we’d all played so many years ago. All I know is that a lot of publications have either refused to cover this game or are still in shock. Either way, where is your bottle’ This is our job. To tell you the truth, we don’t give zero scores here, but I’m kind of reconsidering that policy in case this happens again in the future, or the past. Whatever.
